Anna Zayaruzny ’05 spends much of her time immersed in fourteenth century French music. It is a passion she brought to Wesleyan’s music department as a freshman.
That year, Zayaruzny approached Assistant Professor of Music Jane Alden, who specializes in medieval music.
Alden knew she had found someone special.
“It’s not everyday that a student knocks on my door and tells me that her father made her a lute for her sixteenth birthday,” Alden said. “Anna is quite extraordinary. The whole department feels that way. She’s made a strong impression on the music faculty.”
With Professor Alden, Zayaruzny helped form the Wesleyan Collegium Musicum, a performing ensemble specializing in Renaissance, Medieval, and Baroque European music. The group, now in its fourth year, has used voices with instruments such as harpsichords, an organ, and this year will also feature recorders and viols.
The viols and recorders are an extension of Collegium. Zayaruzny said the viol, an upright string instrument, was developed, at least in part, because it was deemed inappropriate for women to play instruments blown with their mouths.
“Somehow having a viol between your legs is fine,” she said.
Zayaruzny has enjoyed witnessing Collegium’s development.
“I’ve enjoyed seeing it grow, and helping it grow under Professor Alden’s direction,” Zayaruzny said, “It’s nice to have seen it progress from something that was hard to get off the ground to something that is self-sustaining and multi-faceted.”
Zayaruzny’s interest in early music extends far beyond Collegium. She is working on a thesis about Guillaume de Machaut, an important French composer and poet from the 1300s.
Early music is defined more by its time period than by any one genre.
“It’s really anything from before 1750,” she said. “It’s a huge variety of musics—completely different styles, different places.”
So, what does the Early French music sound like?
“Well, to some people it sounds weird,” she said. “Once I was playing a song about love and my housemate said, ‘this makes me think of the tomb.’”
Medieval-inspired music is often used in films to create an austere mood.
It was Zayaruzny’s parents who fostered this interest. They met in the late 1970’s in an early music ensemble in the former USSR city of Kiev, the city where Zayaruzny was born.
“In a way, I’m an early music baby,” she said.
Zayaruzny spent her junior year at Oxford studying fourteenth and fifteenth century music. It was there, she said, that she really began to engage the music on a profound intellectual level.
“When I was able to study it, perform it, and just look at it, it gave me a much fuller understanding of the music within its social and cultural contexts,” she said.
The early French music that is her specialty is quite complex. The music is both symbolic as well as functional.
“The songs are bitextual which means two texts going on at the same time,” she said.
The two texts can have a number of possible relationships. In some pieces, they could be the same thing, but in different languages. Sometimes one is religious and one is secular.
Others are even more tangled.
“In one piece I wrote about, the upper voice talks about how unlucky he is in love, the middle voice brags about his good fortune with his lady, and the bottom voice sings notes that come from a piece of Gregorian Chant and carry their own connotation,” Zayaruzny said.
This mix creates an interesting sound.
“It would have the intellectual effect of listening to Ani Difranco and the Beatles while reading the Bible,” she said.
After all this time listening to medieval music, Zayaruzny says she doesn’t spend much time listening to popular music.
“My problem is with the words,” she said. “I listen for them and often don’t agree with them. I can’t separate words from music, but I’m definitely not as attuned to the subtleties of modern music as I am to a 14th century motet, which makes me a kind of a snob.”
While Zayaruzny’s parents may have spurred this passion, it has become uniquely hers.
“My parents are into Broadway and jazz now,” she said.
Leave a Reply